I love some additional thought about functionality and utility.
I’m already familiar with all the books you called out except the Sandbox Generator, so you’re preaching to the choir here.
That said, I’m me, so I also need to blather on about my own thoughts, in this case about the physical utility of the books. As I’m a (new and still-insignificant) publisher getting hardcover books printed up, I have given this element a lot of thought.
A lot of people enjoy RPG books so much–and buy so many that they never play–that they forget these are fundamentally reference books. What’s more, they’re meant to be referenced in a very complex situation.
People are sitting at a table and they need to check a rule quickly. Every second they haven’t found clarity about a rule, they’re not playing the game. For this, little things matter, and many OSR books shine.
Most do all this anymore, but I’m currently using Shadowdark which does the following to aid utility:
- Sized so you can hold it in one hand at a table (A5 pages).
- Well bound hardcover (smyth sewn so it lasts and can lay flat and stay open).
- Rules for a topic always fit a single spread, no page-turns to flip back and forth.
- The side has black tab marks by topic, so you can eyeball where to flip to.
- There’s a ribbon you can mark your page with.
The content needs utility, but the book is a table object, just like dice and pencils. It has to work.
As someone making a Shadowdark addon, I have to keep all this in mind. To some extent, I ape the style of the SD core rules for the Aetherdark rulebook. For my adventure zine and setting book, my layout is a bit less similar, more individualized.
That’s intentional: the core rules are meant to be used in tandem with the SD core. The transition has to be smooth. The experience needs to be consistent.
I was a bit torn on how similar I’d stayed until I got a 3PP book for SD where the creator used digest-sized pages instead of A5. The content is excellent, but you put them side-by-side and it’s not a fluid experience. You transition from one to the other less smoothly. It’s small, the zine works fine, but I can feel how much better it could have been with that tiny change.